by Amy Scheibe
Emmy’s gaze hung in the space of the empty door where Jim had just passed. “I can hack it,” she murmured, and cleared her throat. “With your help.”
* * *
By the time her training was over at eight and she was on her way back to Josephine’s, Emmy understood that the evident upside to having a cousin who talked a lot was the amount of readily transferred knowledge Emmy now possessed. She had become as intimately acquainted with the inner workings of The Fargo Forum as if she had been born in the break room. First, she’d committed to memory the numbers on the board that correlated with the various reporters and their names, what areas they covered, and where they all sat in the newsroom. She knew which outboxes to empty and when, how to tell if the newswire machines were jammed, and to frequently check for photographs coming over the wire on a special machine that she watched, mesmerized, as it transmitted a picture of a lady in a monstrous Easter hat from a parade in New York City, one line at a time. Her initial anxiety over whether she could handle the job ebbed as she learned each piece of it. The switchboard was the most formidable, and oddly, therefore, the easiest thing to learn. Dot was impressed by how quickly Emmy learned, and had asked her to come back the next day for a test drive on the machine by herself. If she did well, she’d have her own shift by the end of the week, at improved pay of twenty-five cents more an hour than her theater salary. The notion of having a real job, with interesting work and energetic, friendly people, settled the worry that the theater fire had begun, though she still felt distraught about Mr. Rakov’s catastrophic loss and was worried sick about Cindy.
Emmy steered the wagon onto the soft dirt drive of the estate, happy to see the warm lights of the cottage. If only Emmy could find a way to explain to her aunt why she couldn’t go back to her parents’ house, even for one more night, she could then ask Dot if she knew of a place where she could stay longer.
The temperature had dropped considerably, with frost predicted overnight—or at least that was the weather report Dot had shared as Emmy left the building. Music could be heard as Emmy neared the front door, a song that she remembered from her childhood, something low and sweet in its yearning vocals. The words smile the while you kiss me sweet ado popped into Emmy’s head as she heard them float through the slightly open door.
“Hello?” Emmy entered the kitchen, and her stomach growled. She realized she hadn’t eaten a bite since her half of the ham sandwich at lunch. “Josephine?”
“Bring yourself a glass,” Josephine said from the parlor, her voice loud over the strains of the song as it wound down, only to scratch and start again, Josephine’s sweet soprano slightly higher than the tenor’s rich notes. “There’s a song in the land of the lily…”
Emmy took a glass from the cupboard and a piece of fried chicken from a discarded plate on the counter. She went into the cozy room, her eyes slowly adjusting to the dim light enough to see her aunt standing next to the wide horn of a Victrola with a delicately formed goblet in her hand that swayed to the tune as she sang it through to the end. Her hair had been released from its bun and floated in a white cloud around her shoulders, which were draped with a flowing silk gown printed with long-legged white birds. The glow of the fireplace lit Josephine’s face, contorted with the sentiment of the song. At the words till we meet again, she held the glass in the air toward Emmy, the exquisite fabric swinging loosely from the sleeve and almost touching the floor. A messy stack of black records, some in brown paper sleeves, others without, gleamed next to the player on a side table.
“Not that glass.” Josephine folded onto the fainting couch; her legs tucked one at a time under the robe. The magazines from the night before toppled onto the floor, but Josephine didn’t seem to notice or care. She removed the stopper from a crystal bottle that was surrounded by more of the tiny stemware on a table next to her. The thick log in the fireplace popped and hissed in concert with the needle of the Victrola clicking around the finite circle at the center of the record. Emmy flipped the heavy round head of the player in her palm and swung it aside before selecting a goblet and holding it under the unsteady trickle of dark liquid that Josephine poured. “Claret. I only drink French wine.”
“I thought you worked at night,” Emmy said, perching on a rocker next to the fireplace. She took a cautious sip of the wine, expecting it to taste sweet like the grape juice used for communion at church, but found it bitter instead. The chicken, however, was delicious.
“You pay attention. I like that,” Josephine said, draining her glass and refilling it. “Today’s a holiday.”
“Yesterday was a holiday,” Emmy corrected softly. “Today’s just Monday.”
“See, that’s where you’re wrong. Some holidays are celebrations of the self, of having lived long enough to have not died.” Josephine burst into a cackle, covering her mouth with a hand that had taken on spidery dimensions in the low light. “In other words, it’s my birthday.” She raised the glass, found it empty, and refilled it, making Emmy wonder why she didn’t simply use a larger one.
“Happy birthday,” Emmy said, tilting her own wine a bit less tentatively. “If I’d known I would have planned something nice.”
“You are something nice, dear girl,” Josephine said, stretching out along the couch and resting her head on her propped-up right hand. “Besides, when you reach sixty-six alone, there’s hardly any reason to celebrate. Instead, I mourn.” She laughed again, the sound of it like breaking glass.
“You have an odd way of mourning, I must say,” Emmy replied.
Josephine leaned forward just enough to look as though she might tip onto the rug between them, and focused her gaze on Emmy. “Scarlet fever took Mother when I was ten. My father drank himself into the grave next to hers when I was fourteen. My brother Hans joined the army and enjoyed it so much that my other brother, Otto, went right along after, leaving his pregnant wife and four children behind. If you want to meet my brothers, you’ll have to make your way to Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, in France. The cemetery is quite beautiful.” She looked at the glass. “French wine for American blood. A paltry payment, but it will have to do.”
“What about my grandmother?” Emmy asked, eager to shift to the living.
“Oh, Adelaide,” Josephine murmured, and closed her eyes as though picturing the end of a tragic play. “That was the hardest blow. You recover from the dead.”
She told Emmy of how Lida brought her up after their mother died until 1915, when Lida ran off to marry Ben Nelson. It was clearly hard for Josephine, the way Lida erased her family in order to stitch up her own scars, blaming herself for not being able to save their father. “Though God knows he was hell bent,” Josephine said through a gargle of wine. She gestured around the room. “All of this was eventually left to Raymond, and it wasn’t much at the time. I’ve built most of it with my own money.”
“I see,” Emmy said, knowing her understanding was insufficient solace.
“Ghosts,” Josephine barked in reply. “All of them now. They haunt me, Emmy. When I close my eyes at night they are there, waiting to ask me for a way home. It’s why I built the Jeep house after the second war, so I could find a place to sleep and work without their voices beseeching me to call them up.” She drank down the contents of her glass. “It makes for great novels, but not a very good life.”
Emmy trembled at the thought of whispering ancestors. “It doesn’t seem so terrible.” She had been trying to mollify her aunt out of her wretched mood. Instead Josephine’s brow drew tighter and her lids dropped low enough that she tipped her nose to look down along it.
“It wouldn’t look bad to you, all this cushion, but it hasn’t broken my fall.” Josephine tapped a thick nail against the crystal. “Eighteen is such an important age. Everything is felt so deeply and poignantly. I know you think what happened to you with that boy is unique, but it’s not.”
Emmy’s cheeks heated up. She hadn’t realized that Bev would tell Josephine about Ambrose. “It wasn’t what it should
have been.” She tipped the contents of the glass through her lips. “He attacked me, forced me…”
“You honestly think there isn’t some girl out there in a car tonight losing her virtue to the wrong man in the wrong way?” Josephine turned her eyes to the ceiling and then brought them back to Emmy with all the power of a door slamming. “It’s not original.”
“Well, it was to me,” Emmy said, this new aunt’s harsh words stinging. “It happened to me.” Her spirits, lifted so high by the excitement of her new job, sank under the same old weights. “And now I don’t know how to step over it, but I am trying, I really, truly am.”
“Then you’re where you should be,” Josephine said. “Choosing not to be a victim is brave. I may not like my sister’s choice of leaving her family, but I have to admire her courage for sticking with it, no matter how stupid it seemed from the outside. I’m the one who has to live amongst my mistakes.”
Emmy licked the bitter residue of wine from her teeth, wishing to end the fraught conversation before she learned too much all at once. “It must have been quite a loss.”
“You’ve only begun to learn about loss,” Josephine said, the hardness of her expression honing to an edge that was just as quickly softened by a passing cloud of melancholy. “Wait until you have something really worth losing.”
Emmy stood, wary of what confession Josephine might make next. “I have homework,” Emmy said. “I hope it will be all right to stay one more night. I will find a place tomorrow, I promise.”
“You can stay here,” Josephine said without indicating if she meant for one night or many. Her leveled gaze pinned Emmy with its intensity. “You’re strong enough to make your own way, if the world stops being so damn soft on you.”
It was Emmy’s turn to laugh. “I suppose you’re right about that,” she said, feeling strangely lighter than she had since the conversation had begun.
“Help me to bed,” Josephine asked. “I think I’m just drunk enough to brave that room now. I normally wouldn’t risk it, but I’m in need of new material.” A sly smile worked at the corners of her mouth. “You will forgive me anything I’ve said poorly.”
Emmy helped her aunt to her feet and slung a supporting arm around her tiny waist. “I will,” Emmy soothed. “I will.”
Twelve
The Beauty of Patience
Emmy heard the screen door groan open and then snap shut, followed by the sound of her aunt rustling around in the kitchen. It was finally lunchtime, and Emmy hoped that Josephine would be pleased to see the table properly set, with bread baked that morning and wild-flower honey collected from the beehive behind the old machine shed. Emmy had also picked some fresh green peas from the garden, blanched them, mixed in some sour cream and dill, and then placed them in the icebox to chill.
As the morning summer sunlight pooled in a patch on the day porch’s floor, Emmy looked around the funny little house and marveled at how quickly she had taken to the place. Something about the ancestral objects—portraits of immigrant grandparents, a small handmade chair with a thatched seat, a ceramic washbasin and pitcher full of water on her dresser, which she filled every night and used every morning while imagining having to break the ice on a cold winter’s past—felt right to Emmy. She had slipped easily into this place and began to understand more about herself and her desires as she learned more about her family—the family that existed beyond the place she had grown up in, which had simply become the “small house” in her new lexicon. That seemed like another existence entirely, being a small person in the small house. Now she felt somehow taller, more fleshed out, as though someone had been drawing her and finally decided to set down the pencil and pick up the paint. Even her clothes had color now, the old gray skirts and coats given away. She looked down at her lap and admired the pretty red gingham peasant skirt she’d made for herself. It felt wonderful to have the layers of silk and crinoline fluffing the ruffled layers as the fabric circled her where she sat. Emmy had always liked sewing, but after a few weeks of playing with all the wonderful fabrics that Josephine had collected, Emmy had developed a passion for the skill and tirelessly put together an entirely new and grown-up wardrobe. She’d made Josephine some items by way of thanks: slacks and skirts, a sash for her hair, even a new gardening coat festooned with bright blue roses against a white background. Mostly though, Josephine would ramble around the farm in a pair of jodhpurs and a long-sleeved white shirt, and whether she had just gotten off a tractor or emerged from an outbuilding, she looked as though she’d been riding her horse, Kid, nonstop her entire life.
Emmy set down the copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper” that Josephine had suggested she read, pressed herself up from the wicker rocker, and went to help her aunt. Moving through the ancient house, Emmy took in the portraits of immigrant grandparents and tried to imagine what it must have been like for Lida to be a girl in this space, until one day the dolls of childhood lay forgotten, slumped in the corner where they still lay.
“I’ll get those cooked,” Emmy said, taking the egg basket from her aunt. After the night of the Victrola, they’d never talked again of Emmy staying or not, but fallen instead into a companionable pattern welcome to them both. At times, when Emmy came home after work to find Josephine at the kitchen table, there was a sense that her aunt was happy to see her in a way that felt like relief that Emmy had, in fact, returned.
“Put these in that vase,” Josephine instructed, handing Emmy an armful of gladioli and pointing to a ceramic urn. “I need to wash up.”
Pouring the freshly beaten eggs into the hot pan, Emmy waited for the bottom to set before pushing them around with a wooden spoon. She gazed out the window over the adjacent sink, trying to imagine how she would feel when Bobby drove into the yard in half an hour. She wondered whether he had changed much since she last saw him the night of the canteen. She certainly had changed. The separation had been good for her, though, as she had begun to reconcile the cocoon in which she’d been wrapped with the enormous width of her new, damp wings. A too-familiar spell of uncertainty overcame her, a cold wariness that had filled in the space between her disappointment with Ambrose and her hopes for Bobby. She’d known Ambrose so well for so long, and had been so wrong. How could she possibly be right about Bobby, and if she were, how could she ever know for sure?
“Emmy?” Josephine said, emerging from the washroom and startling Emmy, the spoon in midair over the scrambling eggs.
“Oh.” Emmy smiled, shaking her head. “They’re done.” She divided the eggs between two plates and spooned the cool sauced peas over the top of each, adding a sprig of parsley before placing the food in front of her aunt and sitting down. The steam of the hot eggs drove the earthy scent of the herbs into the air, where it mingled with the fragrance from a twine of pale honeysuckle that Josephine had wound into the long stems of scarlet gladioli.
“I don’t think I can eat,” Emmy suddenly said as her stomach drew into a knot. She looked down at her lap and tried to picture Bobby’s face. The memory was hazy at best, causing her doubts to escalate.
“Exhale, Emmy,” Josephine said, an uncommon look of concern on her face. “He’s just a boy. Not the first, and possibly not your last.” Josephine got up from the table and collected her cigarettes and lighter from the counter, a green glass ashtray from the windowsill. She sat back down, lit two smokes, and handed one to Emmy. Josephine drew deeply on her cigarette, exhaled a long ribbon of smoke from her mouth, and then stubbed out the remaining tobacco. “Now eat your food,” she said, unfolding her napkin.
Emmy put the cigarette in the ashtray and let her hand fall back to her lap.
“Perhaps it was too soon for Charlotte’s book,” Josephine said, her eyes carefully trained on Emmy’s face. “I see you’ve sought some solace in domestication.”
Emmy looked around the immaculate kitchen. “I thought you’d be pleased,” she said, confused.
“I’m always happy to have a meal cooked for me,” Josephine said. “I just d
on’t want you to feel compelled.”
“I don’t,” Emmy said, still sensing she’d done something wrong. “I only meant it as a gesture.”
“Gesture accepted.” Josephine picked up her fork. “I love peas.”
“So do I.” Emmy took a bite, chewed carefully, and swallowed, only slightly less overwhelmed by the flavors. She looked at her empty fork, considering how rare it was to enjoy the simple pleasure of eating. Emmy slowly let the air out of her lungs, put out the cigarette untouched, and took another bite. She had never tasted a fresher egg or sweeter cream or a saltier piece of … salt. It was all too much to consume, especially in light of the countless tasteless and unadorned tables she had sat through in her life. Why couldn’t her first eighteen years have been likewise filled with the casual beauty of God’s world? “We never ate like this at home.”
Josephine narrowed her eyes. “With forks?”
Emmy laughed, her cautious mood tempered by the joke. “No, of course we used forks. It’s just that Mother always seemed so suspicious of ripe vegetables, always pickling and canning everything only to hide it all away until it turned gray enough to eat in the middle of the winter.”
“We always had such wonderful meals when my mother was alive,” Josephine replied, resting her chin on her hand, her long fingers rubbing a temple. “Her father was a baker, and she could make such delicate pastries, even out here in the middle of nowhere, in a wood-burning stove. I think she would have started her own bakery if she’d lived long enough to be finished with rearing the four of us. Five if you count little Charlie, but then he died right alongside of her.”
“You’ve never mentioned him,” Emmy said, fascinated by the incessant revelation of unknown relatives. Her great-grandparents had homesteaded the land, building the house out of trees they’d cut down, milled, and eventually covered with clapboard, adding rooms as the family grew to twelve children and countless descendants.
